Why My Grandmother Could Never Escape Ireland

She slept above the creamery, her dreams
rising into the neck of Dublin’s bottle
until she herself slowly separated
out of the thin milk of a dead mother.
She told me her father did not drink
though the chill of iron tankards ruled his hand
as he doled out love, cheating his daughter
by a farthing’s weight for every quart,
ladling on the beatings like a man
dumping the spoils into a stone gutter.
Once he shattered her eardrum, then left
for Liverpool. She, unaccountably, followed,
the harsh buzz of his constant fault-finding
planted permanently inside her skull,
badgering her across a greased Atlantic.

--Richard Broderick (for Evelyn Case Hassard)